In our series of adventure design approaches which began with Antagonists some time back, we’ve been looking at models for quest-based adventures. Flag Captures were the first of these, in which the destination was clear but the path to take was open to player choice, with different obstacles along each potential route. Treasure Hunts took an opposite approach, in which a significant part of the quest was the task of finding the path that would lead to the end, moving from clue to clue toward the uncertain destination. There is one more children’s game which provides a viable model for quest design, and that is the Scavenger Hunt.
If you’ve never been on a scavenger hunt, it is less like a single quest and more like many mini quests pursued simultaneously. In the typical scavenger hunt, each team is given a list of items needed, and sent through the building or the neighborhood or the campground or wherever the game is placed looking for the objects–a paper clip, a ball point pen, a box top from any brand of corn flakes; or in a different setting, a pine cone, an acorn, a smooth rock, a birch leaf. The winning team is the first to gather all the objects, or the team that has the most objects at the end of the allotted time.
Thus the secret to the scavenger hunt approach is that the team doesn’t know where to find what they need, and usually they need more than one object.
There’s a reasonable variant of this similar to Huckle Buckle Beanstalk, in which there is only one McGuffin, one object of the search, but the players must scour an extensive area to find it. This can work well for a variety of objects, including missing persons, hidden bombs, and secret treasures. The single object variant is less predictable in some ways, as the characters might find it immediately or might in the end give up in despair. It is otherwise the same as the multiple object quest. As compared with the other models, it’s rather more frustrating. A single object quest as a Huckle Buckle Beanstalk variant lacks the direction of a treasure hunt approach, in that there are no clues leading to the location of the McGuffin beyond merely process of elimination of possibilities. At the same time, without knowing the destination as in flag capture models, the players can’t create their own focus, and are limited to the systematic elimination of options as the best “plan” they can devise. Thus, although the single object quest can work this way, other models are better for single objects, scavenger hunts being particularly suited to multiple object quests.
I have recently been made aware of another scavenger hunt variant sometimes called Purse and Pockets, in which the next object to be sought is named as the prior one is found. This is more like a series of quests and not as useful a model for role playing game adventures. Players are apt to note that they could have gotten item five at the same place they got item two, if they’d been aware then that they needed it, and so find the sequential revelation of the needs frustrating. Thus for this approach to work, you would need a good reason why the need for item five wasn’t mentioned before. Of course, recently in the installation of a hot water heater I had to make four or five separate trips to a hardware or plumbing outlet as we discovered that there was something else we had not recognized we were going to need or something we had wasn’t what we thought it was. That, however, was not much fun, and if it happened in a game I’d have thought the referee was giving us more grief than we deserved.
When would you have a scavenger hunt type quest? The gathering of potion ingredients is an excellent example. If you need a coatl feather to concoct this potion, you might have to find a coatl, or at least a coatl’s nest, or you might be able to get the feather from a local apothecary or even a milliner, if you’re lucky. You might find the coatl feather while you’re in the mountains looking for an eagle’s egg, and save yourself the trouble of making another trip for the feather. Similarly, a search for parts to make repairs to a space ship when you’re stranded on a planet with a pre-interstellar technology could work this way. So could preparations to withstand a coming assault that require reinforced fortifications and improved defenses, or efforts to concoct one of those A-Team/Magyver-like improvisational devices. In all these situations, the player characters must gather objects, some of which will be harder to locate than others.
The scavenger hunt quest has the advantage that the players can decide in what order to hunt down their needed objects. Some will immediately collect all those they believe will be easy, such as items commonly available through local merchants, and then tackle the tougher ones after they’ve asked some questions about whether these might be commercially available as well. Others will decide that they’ll save the easy ones for the end and go for the hard ones first, knowing that a bottle of olive oil can be picked up any time and doesn’t need much attention, or that they can grab it when they happen to pass the supplier on their way back into town.
Player characters may decide that the best approach to scavenging is to divide their efforts. This is how the Star Trek crew dealt with their quest in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Scotty and McCoy undertook the task of tracking down the materials to build a whale tank. Checkov and Uhura gathered the radioactive particles to regenerate the dilithium crystals. Kirk and Spock went in search of the whales. This is an excellent example of the advantages–and hazards–of a scavenger hunt quest.
This also underscores one of the pitfalls of this approach to quest design. The referee must have a tremendous amount of information about the game world at his fingertips, so that he has answers to the questions of where the objects might be found–not merely where he wants them to be found, but what are the chances that they might be located another way. Is there an a priori reason why the local alchemist would not have a spare pint of manticore blood, saving the characters the trouble of visiting the distant ruins in search of a manticore, or that the local aquarium would not have a mated pair of whales so they don’t have to search the seas? Does the referee have a fair method of answering that question if the players try that–or will the players conclude that of course the alchemist doesn’t have it because the referee wants them to go to the ruins? Is there any other place where a manticore might be caught, and if it happens that the players don’t know there’s one at the ruins and go instead to the dungeons, have they wasted their time or might they find what they seek anyway? I find the best way to handle these kinds of questions is to assess the likelihood that the sought object would be in the searched location, and roll the dice; but in some cases, there will be sufficiently complete information that such a roll is not necessary. Of course, if this is a quest designed by the referee, all of the objects should exist somewhere even if some are extremely rare and difficult to locate. On the other hand, if a player decides to create his own quest, such as collecting a full set of high-value gemstones or scavenging all the parts to build a Mark VII Blaster, that can make an interesting quest, but the referee doesn’t have to guarantee that whatever the player character wants is going to be available.
There is also the last item problem. It may happen that the characters are able to gather all the needed objects but one, and they can’t figure out where to get that one. This may be the more complicated if they have been where it is, but weren’t looking for it at that time and so didn’t notice it. They may think they’ve eliminated possibilities which they haven’t actually properly considered. There aren’t too many good solutions for this, other than to increase the probability that the missing object can be found in the next place they search. Alternatively, if the object is unique or nearly so, it may be that it becomes the McGuffin for a new treasure hunt quest, in which the referee lays out clues to carry them to their needed item.
Those are the variants for quest type adventures that occur to me. There are more adventure design models still ahead, and we’ll get to them eventually.
Next week, something different.
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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.
